> Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.

What are the rough rates for each pool? That's the important part here. And how many artists are far enough from the average ratio that the detail of two pools matters.

https://soundcamps.com/spotify-royalties-calculator/ This site says $0.00238 is typical for "worldwide" and a lot more than that for US and Europe specifically.

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vintermann 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd be interested in knowing that too, as far as I know Spotify doesn't publish details to the public at least.

But I have no trouble believing some artists will be vastly overrepresented in the ad financed pool. Also, there are separate pools by country, and countries have different subscription prices - being big in Japan will be more profitable than being big in India.

Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.

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Dylan16807 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.

CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices.

We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already.

Anything that gives different value to different artists is probably going to favor the big ones and just make things worse.

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vintermann 9 hours ago | parent [-]

CDs get wildly different number of plays. But the number of plays, whether from a record or from a streaming service, isn't proportional to how glad you are that this music exists and you can listen to it.

The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.

	▲	Dylan16807 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do think allocating money per-account or something should be better. Don't let a constant listener allocate the royalties from ten other people. Trying to measure importance feels like a lost cause.